This paper studies the effects of drought shocks in a vulnerable environment – the Brazilian Semi-Arid. We analyze the impact of drought shocks, measured as deviations from long-run historical averages, on agricultural outcomes in a region that suffers recurrently from drought. After controlling for municipality and year fixed effects, we use weather shocks to exactly identify outcomes. Our benchmark

The presence of nonzero conjectural variations in pollution abatement and output make emission taxes less effective with respect to reducing emissions. This has implications for the characterization of the optimal emission tax, particularly in an international context where there are large asymmetries in pollution intensities. A higher degree of collusion in output between polluting firms results in

This paper aims at identifying whether and how sustainable land management practices and livelihood diversification strategies have contributed to moderating the impacts of the El Niño-related drought in Zambia. This is done using a specifically designed survey called the El Niño Impact Assessment Survey, which is combined with the Rural Agricultural Livelihoods Surveys, as well as high resolution

Weather shocks affect smallholder farmers and pastoralists in Sub-Saharan Africa unequally. Agricultural insurance has emerged as a safety net option to protect farmers’ welfare. However, in comparison to other regions, fewer African farmers and pastoralists have adopted agricultural insurance. This review synthesises broad recent literature on why insurance take-up has remained low and highlights

The relationship between temperature and agriculture outcomes in Brazil has been widely explored, overlooking the fact that most of the country's labor force is employed in non-agriculture sectors. We use monthly individual-level panel data spanning the period from January 2015 to December 2016 to ask whether temperature shocks impact non-agriculture wages in formal labor markets. Our results show

Environmental incentives are characterized by two distinct features: (1) a benefit-cost trade-off; and (2) private information about the trade-off. This suggests a degree of freedom of where to attach the private information, either to the benefit or the costs, as long as these choices imply the same behavior absent incentives (‘observation equivalent’). However, we show that different observation

Many Mediterranean-type climates around the world will face increased risks of wildfires as a consequence of climate change. In this study we consider the case of Portugal and estimate the impact of the increasing risk of forest fires on tourism. Using data for 278 municipalities for the 2000–2016 period, we find a considerable negative impact of burned areas on the number of tourist arrivals, both

This paper examines green alliances between environmental groups (EGs) and polluting firms, which have become more common in the last decades, and analyzes how they affect policy design. We first show that the activities of regulators and EGs are strategic substitutes, giving rise to free-riding incentives on both agents. Nonetheless, the presence of the EG yields smaller welfare benefits when firms

This paper evaluates the short-term health effects of in utero drought shock using repeated cross-section household data on Malawi. The main finding reveals that the effects of in utero harvest variability caused by rainfall shocks on child growth indices are driven by the deleterious effects of negative rainfall deviations, namely droughts. Negative rainfall deviation during the agricultural season

Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa is regularly threatened by the occurrence of weather shocks. We wonder whether the way farmers respond to shocks can affect land use and induce deforestation. Reviewing the existing literature, we found that this question has only been marginally studied. Drawing from the adaptation and land-use change literatures, we then expose the mechanisms through which weather

Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency of extreme weather events, increasing the vulnerability of smallholder farmers dependent on rain-fed agriculture. We evaluate the extent to which farmers in Malawi suffer crop production losses due to extreme weather, and whether sustainable land management (SLM) practices help shield crop production losses from extreme events. We use a three period

We analyse the relationship between individuals' subjective wellbeing (SWB) and measures of their country's sustainability. SWB data are sourced from the World Values Survey; sustainability is measured by ecological footprint (EF) and by components of the World Bank's adjusted net savings (ANS) series. ANS, a measure of weak sustainability, represents changes in a country's capital stock including

From any state of economic and environmental assets, the maximin value defines the highest level of utility that can be sustained forever. Along any development path, the maximin value evolves over time according to investment decisions. If the current level of utility is lower than this value, there is room for growth of both the utility level and the maximin value. For any resource allocation mechanism

This paper addresses a serious environmental concern in Chile: PM2.5 concentration, a health threat especially affecting the population living in the central and southern communes of Chile. Using housing data for 312 spatial units, along with interpolation techniques to predict air pollution for communes with missing information, we find that, on average, 1 μg/m3 increase in PM2.5 produces a decrease

There is growing evidence that early life conditions are important for outcomes during adolescence, including cognitive development and education. Economic conditions at the time children enter school are also important. We examine these relationships for young adolescents living in a low-income drought-prone pastoral setting in Kenya using historical rainfall patterns captured by remote sensing as

This paper examines the impact of climate shocks, measured as temperature and precipitation variability, on real monthly per capita consumption expenditure of Indian households over the 1988–2012 period, utilising data from the National Sample Survey Organisation's Consumer Expenditure Surveys. The regression results show an increase in consumption by 1.2 per cent on average, in response to a one standard

Low and highly variable prices plague the coffee market, generating concerns that coffee farmers producing in shade systems under natural forests, as in biodiversity hotspot Oaxaca, Mexico, will abandon production and contribute to deforestation and reduced ecosystem services. Using stakeholder information, we build a setting-informed model to analyze farmers' decisions to abandon shade-grown coffee

This paper explores the driving forces behind household waste generation in the Portuguese municipalities. The focus of the analysis is to empirically test the validity of the waste Kuznets curve (wKc) hypothesis, which postulates an inverted U-shaped relationship between waste generation and economic activity. Panel data is collected for 307 municipalities over the 2009–2018 period. Estimating the

Equity and efficiency are crucial issues behind any tax reform, but they are particularly relevant in countries with high inequality and large shares of poverty. This paper provides a comprehensive socio-economic empirical assessment of Mexico's proposed (and partially implemented) tax reforms in the energy domain, and of a hypothetical partial removal of existing electricity subsidies. Using a rich

This paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of environmental standards by studying the role of income inequality and freedom of the press. Given that evidence of the environmental Kuznets curve has only been found for some countries, it is thus crucial to investigate whether other factors besides income per capita levels may be affecting countries' decisions to pass environmentally-friendly

Using the panel data of 89 economies from 1995–2012, this study examines the major drivers of agricultural emissions while considering affluence, energy intensity, agriculture value added and economic integration. We find long-run cointegration among the variables. Furthermore, our empirical results based on a dynamic fixed effects autoregressive distributed lag model show that the increases in income

This paper analyzes the behavior of cross-country growth rates with respect to resource abundance and dependence. We reject the linear model that is commonly used in growth regressions in favor of a multiple-regime alternative. Using a formal sample-splitting method, we find that countries exhibit different behaviors with respect to natural resources depending on their initial level of development

Subsidies to promote tree plantations have been questioned because of negative impacts of the forestry industry. Quantitative evidence on the socioeconomic impacts of afforestation subsidies or of tree plantations is elusive, mainly due to data scarcity. We assess the overall impact of a tree plantation subsidy in Chile, using our original 20-year panel dataset that includes small area estimates of

This study uses household panel data from Malawi's 2010/11 and 2012/13 Integrated Household Panel Survey to investigate the mitigating role of its Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) against the deleterious impacts of negative rainfall shock on households’ welfare in rural Malawi. The study finds that the FISP has a cushioning role on the negative impact of rainfall shocks. The use of a farm input

We study climate change policies using the novel pattern scaling approach of regional transient climate response in order to develop a regional economy–climate model under conditions of deep uncertainty. We associate welfare weights with regions and analyze cooperative outcomes derived by the social planner's solution at the regional scale. Recent literature indicates that damages are larger in low

Weather extremes which are accelerated by changing climate greatly decrease agricultural productivity, resulting in severe economic losses and losses of livelihood of the poorest marginal communities. The adoption of stress-tolerant rice varieties (STRVs) is recommended as a best technology fix for risk adaptation. Although STRVs provide better outcomes with no yield penalty, farmers' decisions to

This study examines how human capital develops in response to early-life weather and pollution exposures in the Philippines. Both pollution and weather are examined in relation to short- and long-term human capital outcomes. We combine a three-decade longitudinal survey measuring human capital development, a database of historical weather, and multiple databases characterizing carbon monoxide and ozone

This paper examines whether green Official Development Aid (ODA) has a significant role in mitigating carbon emissions in recipient countries, and if institutional quality matters for the effectiveness of green ODA. For 86 green ODA recipient countries over the period 2003–2014, we explore the nexus between green ODA, institutions and carbon emissions. By using a two-step system generalized method

With the increasing number of natural disasters, understanding the links between these events and child health has become timely and pertinent. Using a panel dataset, this paper empirically investigates the persistent effects on child health due to exposure to a series of natural disasters that occurred from 2002 to 2007 in Indonesia. We find that girls exposed to multiple disaster events are 0.19

We examine relations between strategic environmental policy, international R&D cartels and research joint ventures (RJVs), using a third-country model with Cournot duopoly. We indicate that forming an R&D/RJV cartel reduces governments' incentives to extract rent from consumers in the third country. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that social welfare under R&D cartels with full information

This paper aims to consider the meaning of the dismal theorem, as presented by Martin Weitzman [(2009) On modeling and interpreting the economics of catastrophic climate change. Review of Economics and Statistics91, 1–19]. The theorem states that a standard cost–benefit analysis breaks down if there is a possibility of catastrophes occurring. This result has a significant influence on debates regarding